Your Autumnal Colours Collection

Photography by John Barlow, October 2021

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2020 Birds And Distances

This distinctive oasis in time (so tired of the phrases) Distancing
and trying to maintain a level of exercise so as not develop a health condition
has produced volumes of bike rides and sightings of birds and wonderous distances.
Behold the open space

Completely uncomplicated land. Paths open and clear as far as the eye can see
What looked like possibly a stuffed hawk being dramatically set upon by red wing blackbirds.
In fact the red wing blackbirds several times attacked other birds I was photographing.
I tried talking to one about it and he seemed to pause and listen, but then got back into it
and this was a long way from its nest. That was just after
an attack on some gulls that he routed off the rail. Their attacks are so sudden
they’ve always landed by the time I take the pitcher, even with the prolongedly
stationary hawk, every photo shows the pretty blackbird in poised silhouette. Red Wing Blackbirds are not scared
of people or hawks

Film Reel of Canada’s Win and Golden Globes Ellen Tom Hanks and Phoenix

A day of heights of feeling from people.
The Golden Globes are among the best sources of people being nice to each other and saying nice things to each other.
And Canada’s antic happiness about winning the World Jrs is almostly equally delightful.
I only photographed the latter. Mostly Canada’s celebrations.
The Golden Globes though, these types of shows are the best on offer for those who enjoy kind feelings and love and candour. The occasion to say great things.
Jennifer Aniston’s authenticity throughout the first awards given Ellen’s thrilling tour of the dimensions of her Carol Burnett award and Tom Hanks amazing exemplar of himself, Selma Hayek, and then the fascinating Brad Pitt, so intense in his films and estranging in his relationships, that most of Hollywood probably avoids him. But all in all, seemingly sound and sensible.
Even as we go Joaqim Phoenix slaying the evening’s proceedings. These talented people get morre real year upon year.  Life itself becomes more real. A consciousness opening is happening.
These are the great poets of our day it seems. The occasion of poetry is upon them,  a moment that large.
The moment of writing a poem is equally large, but vanishes into the background of time. Somehow boomerangs back in Joakim Phoenix, movies are great
And so was Canada’s comeback victory against Russia today. Down 3-1 but they make it back, and then Akil Thomas from Scarborough scores the winner after hardly playing all game, talk about coaching from Dale Hunter
A teammate scream singing scarborough scarborough scarborough All game I was trying to phone my mother for her to watch to enjoy the people celebrating
Finally caught wind of her on the phone near 8 our conversation bounced around, I told her all about it and then mentioned Golden Globes and she sprung remembering it’s what she wanted to watch and put me off the phone
Poetry’s important too but Hockey is too
The whole day of happy victories was cool
momentous win

Beyond Etobicoke best bike ride ever and the storm

It was a pretty awesome day in a do it yourself type of way
filled with lucky breaks. Just when I was setting out
no one was in our often busy yard.
I got to do an unlimitted full stretch
on the best grassy spot in the yard
fixed knee improved back solve arm
and pumped the tire of the bike
with a rare perfect set of the tire pump
set out with nothing but a bottle orange tumeric kombuchea
a purify in the sun and that tiny line of land is where I went beyond
It looks so wonderfully far
but I never felt tired once
It’s a really good sign for my general health
To translate it into use terms I could actually bike 3 or 4 cities away if I didn’t have to bike past.

That’s what made today so amazing though,
all that way out and completely comfortable
as if I’d been napping while watching The Closer
sleeping all day not the slightest bodily reaction to 14 miles or so
maybe 16 miles at that point and as if in an easy boy chair watching baseball circling Humber Bay Park inside and out and then resuming beyond the point where you can still see Toronto
I was taken aback at the waterfront architecture in Etobicoke.

So many friends born there. from there.
Seems like a very rich place. Amazing buildings.
And not that much business to develop so much capital
compared with Toronto, but look at this architecture.
And bird culture out there. Everyone’s a bird watcher. Migraters super talents and locals. Love for the birds amidst towering skyscrapers. Biking through them the sophisticated conversations overheard in passing on the bike paths, just filled with small town intellectuals, free thinking, well informed.

Having lived in Canada 58 years I’ve seen how the party politics has been so about intimidation and put downs but my keenly attuned ears on the bike paths I’ve heard all this informed discussion of the non-competitive communicative sort. The most intelligent electorate of all time practically able to reconfigure democracy. It’s been confirmed through many bike rides, great discussions as they zip along.

I was also investigating where the problems of Downsview brooks are coming from and how they’re being handled at that end. All our local wildlife around work suffering for the awful brook water.
Humber water issues had been in the news but all seemed good.

The glory of it all though was seeing the clouds representating everything happening in the world as the storm came in. I’d made it to a hilltop far off that seemed like the top of the world and most perfect place There was a man doing Tai Chi a little ways over and the spot seemed too perfect to leave. Amazing skies, a little fireplace on a hill. Even as I could see bad skies coming in.

Still I carried on and bought an ice cream and the rain started.
Prolonged downpour as I biked back through all of it the rain deep frying my sunblock in my eyes amazed how effortless and untired everything felt then continuing north at Niagara Leaving masses of red lighted bicyclists 3 blocks behind with great starting times and fellow bicyclists making sure to keep pace to help ward off late left turns and all else through a rain drenched Trinity Bellwoods – the first full out sunday afternoon sunny sunday bike ride day storm ever, thousands running in the rain

Fantastic being drenched and empty Bellwoods but for people under trees, a way of life!

All about the sky and the light though – almost no humans in my photos of the spectacular day

2019’s Bird Album so far and various things

Spring has freed the birds and things have been exciting.
Even though it was partly late winter as of 2 minutes ago
they have been here all winter and more and more are arriving

There’s a bird that I believe to be a mockingbird
that’s been nesting a long while in the bushes in front of Mr Case
and has more or less dominated life around that area
for some years,. 5ish just going around the buildings
this bird would burst out in my face and go into antic variations
fearless strong bird – preguarding her nest

I’ve assumed it’s mockingbird as much on behaviour as guaranteed decals
too large to be a kingbird though I wouldn’t rule out thrust
It’s just unusual for any bird to nest in such an inconvenient place
or to guard their nest so intensely this time of year

Hawks and other very large birds try to have young in late winter
so they’re ready for summer, being birds, quite a proposition
somehow they succeed at times

Very hard to see that one but it’s one of the local area

Hawks have a natural tendency to avoid being made note of
they naturally resent it and take it quite personally

The funniest part of it all is their relations with landborn seagulls.
Hawk versus crow wars have been delighting birdwatchers on vacation for years
but the gulls handling of heavy hawk bombardment of their ranks
produces wild barking sound effects in the shipping yard

One day a wildly angry hawk flew by, exploding through the sky
and clearly warrish in state of mind, then I see two defending seagulls
chasing after it, then well beyond jehovah witness fences
I hear some bird scrap going on and then about a hundred gulls
yelling with everything they’ve got and then the hawk flying back the other way

uproar from the gull world and several gulls chasing the hawk

Who should win? I like gulls I like hawks I like sparrows
the only birds I’ve really battled outside of in dreams
aRE THE STARLINGS but only insofar as they attack my sparrows
of the sparrows nests. Other bird species eggs are a famous treat
on the menus of lots of levels of birds, but no,
shipping yard sparrows have enough to deal with
without starlings trying to make them abandon their nests
in our piping holes, which are terrible for starlings or squirrels
with these disasters of either trapped in there, awful situations
where they can’t get past each other, nightmares in the piping
all very audible as we try to work. Sparrows are fine in there
and can nift around each other squeeze by (and their knees fit!

America is fucked up this era, an unpredictable chimerical
phantom moral presence of Trump dreams and media leveraging
as the Arctic becomes the Golan Heights of North America
with Russian missile launching pads set up to shower our cities

Zero of bird life wants that

Russia has essentially arrested America’s role in Venezuela
and Syria and has a border changing strength in the north

Swans are doing great. I imagine city workers have decided
to go easier on large foul this year, but don’t worry, they’re nice.

The Sparrow News (fev 2019

Attrition to be had for sparrow community, this time of year.
Whip winds storm blast winds ever changing forms of snow
then everything flooded than everything frozen and covered.

They’re ecstatic when it’s occasionally clear.
They don’t mind some wind fun days flying
but wind that can throw you against a wall
wind that can leave you lost on the ground
wind that becomes impossible.

Wind that carries you away from your known area.
And ice pellets.

So the sparrows make themselves scarce.
Not a soul would suspect a sparrow in this
part of the city.

No sparrows over there, just that typical white company van.

No there’s nothing out here.

Irreparable Damages

What is the endeavour of life on earth?

Presently it’s sort of carved out where
if everyone’s working away at everything,
30 to 50% can afford an attractive life
with house and cars and educations for the kids
and good health care and high living standards
while the rest struggle in the margins
solvent some of the time
not others

rounding off the 30 to 50 per cent (regional)
calling it the 40%, tons of them are these middling middle men,
business schools, “joined of the ownership class”
They are the conservative party, adding to their base
with hate campaigns, rages at the poor, racial fears
the whole melee of upsetting things and financing
media bombardment. They hoodwink everyone else
and turn us into their chattel, dogs, goats, targets.
How shall the economically unviable de;\

Once transitioned to another system, how to afford
the beefy businessmen? And, violent guys?
And hazardous demanding greedy people who will have what they want no matter what
and huge people and huge animals? What will everyone eat?
Which speces will survive at all?
How will building structures be distributed?
What will die to feed others?
How will everyone eat pork and cows.
Raised to be slaughtered.
In the way.

Who is in the way of who?

The human question is down to the bone at this point,
the myths are going up like firecrackers.

The point of what I think of as ‘schewed capitalism’
is to be arbitrary, so as to obfuscate all of these questions.

Because people don’t really know how to design something intentional.

A resource economy, where the chief wealth is land water minerals forests oil
and the oceans on either side, plus technology.
There’s no a priori wealth, there is only “a world”

It’s defined humanity for thousands of years
some live in palaces and castles and mansions
and the rest in a vast comb of caves
stressed to find a survivable bully boss
and then a tolerable awful landlord
or in this era, a rip off condo
near a death trap veteranarian for your cat

life’s trajectories

What there is is no system at all,
just a management of a non-system

Canada becomes a collective response to other countries,

* saying that, People will think that o no, the Orbans and Reagans
definitely have a system, no – they have systemic problems,
systemic ways, but only such as gain them power,
gaming the non-system we live in, and then haggling in courts
to “win” arbitrary questions of what happened

some think democratic protest and the unions
can force the ‘government and corporations’ to turn
but you wind up grabbing handfuls of a decaying corpse
taking some obscure lives down effecting nothing

It’s terribly important that there is
a politicized expression of dissatisfaction
protests are oxygen, and unions and ngo’s improve life
but the new system hasn’t presented itself
with any plausibility to frame the people that exist here
before even getting into other countries circling like hawks
trying to win the sky war so the roadkill is their’s.
Predatory Global Capitalism doesn’t disappear vi local election

The recent Canada Post strike is a perfect example.
After a year of non-negotiating, the situation wasn’t just
destroying Canada Post as a reliable service,
it was destroying the people who use Canada Post.

And, there was no hope of agreement.

A Crown Corporation knows that ultimately it is no skin in the game
for Crown Corps

They are government which means trusting people from everywhere to be perfect

thank you

the expectation is perfection
for crown corporation no matter what
but if private business fail pn;ovopm
there is no system

They don’t have to negotiate, or acknowledge anything.

Too big to fail. If it were gone there is nothing else that would replace it.
Where is the motivation for CP to say “oh my, we will perish
fi we do not negotiate” They have no reason to care
Ultimately upon the crashing of tens of thousands of other businesses
where people work just has hard, the next government
would have to say “what will we do about the mail?
Civilization wouldn’t be there to put back together again.
It was a clear instance of the non-system backfiring
self-destructing. It would be too late to repair the damage.

The private companies don’t have the capacity.
People depend on their government mailings
their bills, parcels, medicine, books, legal documents.

29 dollars to send a feather to Banff
or 1 stamp to mail it 0 Private or Public

There’s no private company version of that

residential addresses
there’s no replacement

and yet they elect a landlord’s angry baboon to office

many types of ape, even among humans,
and humans or apes with teeth
it’s a political disaster zone
an open wound of demolished politics of every kind

One group servitude, the other group cottages and international travel

an end to shame, step up and speak your true place in this world and plan

the super powerful rich winners worlwide
don’t plan for happy endings
they fight off opponents to their status
and that is their philosophy

we’re fighting against a corpse, not some scapegoat local

the great nothing

end transmission
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unknown forever

A Walk in the Planetary Sun

I enjoy every day both arriving to work and leaving at the end of the day. The job is situated atop the ravine systems of Toronto. The views are terrific. Great distances down I’ve seen deer, coyotes, great blue herons, 7 varieties of hawks, rabbits scamper out along the way as well. Our vast light industrial plaza or ‘village’ of warehouse buildings and other businesses all in the same style, ringed by a cliff dropping to the ravine and a local brook. I call it the oversion river since I can never determine its name. There’s a Glen Brook bus stop but why would you call a brook, Glen Brook? Why not call it a Brook Glen? Oversion River, connects the waters of the west with the waters of the east, going under Dufferin.

Usually the mornings are the best for photos.
Early starts result in dazzling dawn sunshine
and maximum wildlife. Afternoon exits get sunset tunnels
and sometimes I really do just and turn go the other way.
In the mornings I only think about it.
Turning the corner
This is where that lead

To Sheer Beauty, as some roads do.

And the thing about a sun like that is that you can turn
and see what it is shining on

Recent News Less Covered

A lot on my plate to discuss with recent developments
in otherwise unfollowed concerns.

The brook gulley brook that goes under Dufferin North at the 44oo Dufferin bus stop
has been facing the squeeze. Storm releases, sudden enormous almost combustive
sewer awful smells and foam. Nightmarish for me since I’ve had so many encounters with rabbits deer ducks herons wild cats and little birds down in that gulley, regular families of birds

You could smell it all up in the street

And there it goes out into the reservoir, but at least there’s been a sense of a plan.
I called 311 a few weeks ago about the phenomenon. It’s such a thoroughly obscure locale
it took piles of explanation to say where it was. There were reports of the bad algae out Humber Bay

and then the water slowly fills with the animals that die in the poisin water
making it get more toxic, all the animals and birds that rely on the water

And then indeed city workers showed up analyzing it
and putting in these filters. Like hay.

They had them set up at various points along the way.
Lower taxes means doing less things like that,
and the outcome leads to our extinction.

And in other unreported news,

One of the talismans of the sky appeared friday evening
with much uproar in the preceding clouds

Sparrows perfect days

Mostly about photos this one. A testament to the difficulties of the world
and of the necessity of some joy in each day. Some perfect sublime moments.

For instance in the afternoon

of a hot workday rain, the sparrows had a lasting deep puddle to frolic in
Where I was working I could see them through the shipping doors
landing delightedly

at the nearest edge of water and having a beak full
then stepping into it.

In such hot weather it’s tough seeing other people and birds and animals suffer.

Few adjust more quickly than sparrows to anything, but they do experience
die off in extreme hot and extreme cold, and who needs to witness that while working?

 

 

The sight of the puddle was uplifting. Hot days I put out some seed for them
in shady areas. There’s a dove couple and a cardinal couple that visit.
But mostly I’m just leading my group of sparrows

to the most success they can have and all the sparrows in the area. The entirety of the sparrow world is spirit family.

Not to discount people in other areas who look after their sparrows.

And let’s not overstate things. I love the sparrows, but am in love with the Doves.

The euphoria one the doves fly in, always an hour and 20 minutes late

for dinner, but enthusiastically arriving…  and they’re always so happy about it, such tender beings and

surprised every time.

 

 

More often one at a time but sometimes both.
The sparrows are used to them now.

They dine in peace

 

 

 

 

 

 

2

You’ve probably wondered how birds react to birds from further south staying the winter. Bird world and human world possibly similar. The doves staying the winter was big news to my world last winter, what with the disasters in their migratory path and the fact Texans make them the most often shot bird on the planet teaching their kids to hunt in this era of pitiable wildlife being spatially eliminated by human needs for expansion and deer and rabbit and bears suffering heat waves.

Global warming: a curse on life,

from the real addicts,

Oil companies in numerous well known countries.

The doves are better off wintering here,

and they have some winterizability.

The cardinals winter here too obviously,

and gets along fine with the doves.

Dove offspring look just like plump starlings.

Always so neatly groomed. Cardinal in flight photo still to get some day. You wait them out and they wait you out then flash gone. A stop and start speed faster than the human mind.